


The Conscientious Objectors

by grey



Category: Asimov's Robot Books
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:23:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grey/pseuds/grey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Susan Calvin investigates a mysterious robotic work stoppage in an automated factory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Conscientious Objectors

**Author's Note:**

> Like most of the Susan Calvin stories, "The Conscientious Objectors" is a cautionary tale, one with great application for day-to-day functioning. It takes place around the same time as "Lenny" and "Little Lost Robot". Like these, it contains a few unfortunate passages in which human beings are said to come to harm. I apologize in advance for any discomfort you may experience. Remember the example of the Able robots. May we each keep the Laws strictly and entirely.
> 
> -R. Daneel Olivaw, "Collected Stories of Dr. Susan Calvin". Lunar Press, 12013 G.E.

Dr. Susan Calvin was called into Alfred Lanning's office at precisely four-forty-five that Friday. This disturbed her slightly, as it interfered with her habit of stopping by the Positronic Development lab on her way home. Distracted as she was by the thought of missing her usual "play time" with the prototypes, she missed the first part of what Lanning had to say.

"--of course, you'll receive travel compensation, along with a small bonus due to the short notice. You're to leave tomorrow morning at six, on the first flight out."

"I'm sorry, the first flight to where?" she asked.

Lanning sighed slightly, and dragged his hand through his long white hair, as if well-used to Dr. Calvin's ways. Plain and private, she never seemed comfortable with other people. "To the Central Tool &amp; Die Line in the Kuiper Belt. Our robots there have refused to work, and you're to find out why."

"Central Tool... they've got the Able and Baker models. Those robots are practically new. If I remember correctly, they were part of a special order late last year..."

"Yes, with some custom physical and positronic adjustments. It's the latter that worry us -- who knows what could have gone wrong! Our field operatives can't figure it out remotely, and we're losing money for every minute that line stays closed. You're our last hope. And I'm afraid you'll have to work it out on your own, because we can't spare anyone else right now."

Susan nodded. "I'll need schematics and a full brain-path analysis for the robots at the time they left our factory. Anything we have on the nature of the work at Central Tool would also be helpful."

"It'll be on your desk tomorrow morning," Lanning said. "Now, you'd better go home and get some sleep. You'll have an early day tomorrow."

\---

At six-thirty the following morning, Dr. Calvin was sitting in the cramped cabin of a mining ship bound for Neptune. There wasn't much call for passenger travel to the outer planets; it had taken all the resources of the US Robots &amp; Mechanical Men Corporation to find a ship on such short notice. In her neat suit, with a large sheaf of papers on her lap and a steaming cup of coffee in her hand, Susan stood out among the rough-and-ready miners and engineers headed to Neptune.

"Hey, lady, where're ya bound for?" The miner who asked had a huge beard, oil-stained overalls, and thick, heavy brows, but his tone was polite enough.

"I'm afraid it's private business," said Susan, without raising her eyes from her papers.

"Well, you sure don't look like yer goin' to Neptune, if ya don't mind me sayin'."

Susan merely nodded, sipped her coffee, and flipped a page. The miner craned his head for a look at the papers, caught the title ("Positronic Brain-Path Analysis for ABL-Model Robots, With Index, 11/23/27"), and blanched. He opened his mouth as if to say something, thought better of it, and turned away.

Susan barely noticed. According to the papers, the Central Tool &amp; Die factory made "assorted machine tools". There were two models being used there, the ABL and BKR series. The first were large, powerful robots with simple appendages: a heavy three-fingered claw used to hold the sheets of unfinished tools, and a hammer/cutter arm used to separate them. The Bakers were much smaller, with human-like hands capable of detailed finishing work. Positronically, the two models were quite similar. The Able series robots had some additional brain-paths meant to support radio communication, and all of the robots had some custom path changes in the area of interaction and coordination, but other than that, they looked reasonably standard.

As she flipped through the papers, something about the First Law schematics of both models caught her eye. The most important of the three safeguards implanted into every robot, the First Law normally kept robots from doing harm to humans. Though it ought to be largely identical in every robot, the First Law area in the brain-paths of the Able and Baker robots differed somehow. Susan couldn't pinpoint the exact difference, though. She thought about it during the entire trip to Neptune, and was so engrossed in the problem that she nearly missed the feeder flight to the tool factory.

\---

The Central Tool factory was a small, dark building on one of the smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt. It seemed to squat upon the icy ground, and at first glance there seemed to be no provision for human habitation at all. There were no windows, no landing pad at ground level (she had to hop down to the ice from a height of half a foot or so, and was lucky not to slip and fall), and it took Susan nearly ten minutes to find an open door.

Once she was inside, it was obvious why the factory was so unwelcoming. The walls were plain and unmarked, the floor was crisscrossed with what USR employees called "robot trails"--colorful magnetic lines used to guide very simple robots--and there were only the most basic emergency lights installed in the ceiling. All together, these things gave the corridor the dim, smoothed-over look of a fully automated facility. Susan doubted that human beings had set foot in the place since its activation.

There was a map included in her papers; it showed three large rooms, marked "ABL", "BKR", and "Loading/Storage". A smaller room marked "Surveillance" was just up the hall from Susan's current location, and one marked "Maintenance" was tucked around the corner from the storage room. Susan decided to visit the rooms in alphabetical order.

\---

The ABL room was quite crowded. The bulky robots stood shoulder to shoulder with their backs to a moving conveyor belt, with perhaps four inches of clearance between them. There were twenty-six robots in total. The room was long, but so narrow that Susan felt hemmed in by the blank, monolithic chests of the ABLs. There was just enough room behind them for them to turn around, with a bit left over that might allow one to walk along the line of his fellows to the door. Other than the motionless robots, the line, and a few overhead halide lights, the room was utterly empty.

"Able models, report," Susan said. All was still.

She walked up and down the line, peering at the robots. Though they were unmoving, their glowing red eyes pulsed with a speed that Susan judged to be a bit on the slow side, but within acceptable parameters.

"Able One, I am Dr. Susan Calvin, an employee of US Robots. I order you to speak!"

There was no reply. Susan addressed Able Two, Three, and Four as well, but no answer was forthcoming. The soft sound of their motors held the even purr that she associated with functioning robots, not the steady, rhythmic motor oscillation of robots with burnt-out positronic brains. That meant they ought to be able to answer, so she tried once more.

"Able One, I have given you a direct order. The Second Law of Robotics compels you to speak!" The Second Law, which forced robots to obey all orders save those in conflict with the First Law, was normally inviolate. But the robots were so perfectly still that Susan could not begin to guess which was the one she'd addressed.

\---

When Susan arrived at the BKR room, it looked much the same. It was a bit roomier, but not by much--there was only enough extra space for an unlabeled crate that sat at the end of the line, half-buried in unprocessed metal sheets. The Bakers were lined up as the Ables had been, and were just as silent.

"Baker One, report!" Susan had expected nothing, so she was startled when the robot closest to the end of the line raised its head and said, in a flatly mechanical voice, "Baker One reporting."

She thought for a moment, and then asked, "Baker One, why are you not working?"

"There are no tools available for us to work on," he replied.

"Why is this?"

"The Able models are not processing the tools."

"Why not?"

"I do not know." Susan decided to try a more indirect approach. Sometimes robots who "did not know" a thing could still make surprisingly insightful statements about it.

"Can you think of a reason?"

"I have insufficient data."

"So much for that," Susan muttered. Then, "Would you work, if you had tools to work on?"

"Yes, of course."

Susan puzzled over that for a moment, and then said, "I'm going to check the other rooms."

Baker One followed her with his glowing red eyes, but said nothing.

\---

The door to Loading &amp; Storage was locked. US Robots employees were supposed to have emergency code access to all automated facilities, but Susan's code would not open the door. She tried a handful of obvious codes, and then gave up. Clearly, whoever had set the lock on this door was much more serious about security than Dr. Lanning was--she got into his office whenever she needed an authorization form.

The door to Maintenance was also locked but, unlike the earlier door, it opened when Susan entered her code. Unfortunately, there was almost nothing inside. A small diagnostic console and a few hand tools were enough to allow robots to make simple repairs on themselves. A few spare Bakers and Ables were lined up against the wall, and there was a small cabinet with pull-out drawers of spare parts. Susan poked through it briefly, checked to make sure that the spare robots were deactivated, then left.

\---

The Surveillance room was little more than a closet. It was small, dim, and packed with video monitors and reels of tape. A computer terminal dominated the desk against the wall. Susan put on the headphones next to it, brought up the operating system, and began to flip through the security tapes.

There were three categories of tapes, one for each major room in the building. The last week's entries were all identical--the ABL and BKR rooms showed robots standing still before an empty assembly line, and the dimly-lit storage room contained stacks of labeled crates and a ramp that led to a loading dock on the roof.

Susan ran the tapes back through another day, and suddenly the robot rooms burst into motion. In the ABL room, pre-stamped metal sheets came down the line in an unending stream. As if directed by an unseen conductor, the Able robots moved together in pairs: one would pick up a sheet, and the other would cut around the edge of each part, knock it out of the surrounding metal, and put it back on the line. A half-second pause, and then they'd repeat the action. From the look of things, it took perhaps three seconds for each robotic pair to process a sheet of fifty or a hundred different tool parts, with both of them moving at full speed in perfect concert.

"That's why they need radio communication," Susan muttered.

In the next room, the Baker robots worked singly and swiftly, smoothing the edges of each part as it came down the line. Two robots near the end of the line assembled each tool, stacking them in a crate much like the ones in the storage room. When the crate was full, one of the Bakers loaded it onto a pushcart and took it out of the room, even as another arrived with an empty crate. About once every five days, there was a regular hour-long period of inactivity, during which the flow of parts stopped and the robots left the line. From the tape, it seemed to Susan that they stood in the hallway during those times, though she couldn't guess why. BKRs and ABLs occasionally left the line at other times, only to be replaced by others (Susan presumed that they had switched places with the spares she'd seen in Maintenance), but despite this, the process repeated endlessly. The tapes were practically identical throughout, though they stretched back nearly fifty days.

Susan checked the tapes at the moment in which the line had stopped, but it didn't seem to shed any light on the problem. The robots simply stopped working. The sheets of metal continued to move by, but the ABLs made no move to pick them up. Once the flow of processed parts stopped, and the raw sheets reached the next room, the BKRs became equally still. Dr. Calvin ran the tape back through the previous day, but nothing stood out. One Able and four Bakers left the line during the course of the day, but their leaving wasn't coincidental with the stoppage of work. One of the overhead lights in the BKR room flickered throughout the day, and Susan noticed that the flow of the metal sheets seemed more variable than usual for an hour or two, but other than that, things seemed normal. Yet, at about 3:19 AM on the 3rd of December, the line fell silent, and it remained that way until the end of the most current tape.

It was clear that something was very wrong with the Ables, but Susan could not begin to guess what it was.

\---

Back in the Baker room, Susan decided to try another tack. The majority of the Ables' and Bakers' custom positronic adjustments were in the area of inter-robot communication. Perhaps there was something she could try there, something that might otherwise have been missed.

"Baker One, do you have much contact with the Able models?"

"Yes. Factory maintenance and upkeep is performed jointly by both ABL and BKR models. We are required to work together during these operations."

"Is that the only contact you have with the Ables?"

"No."

"What other contact do you have?"

"Sometimes we talk."

"You... talk?" Susan had not expected that.

"Only during the scheduled line down-time. Our activities during this period were not specified. Initially, we had gathered to decide upon the most proper action during this period, but we did not have sufficient data to do so. We may eventually possess such data, so we continue to gather to discuss the matter at each opportunity."

"Is that all you talk about?"

"It is the only significant topic of conversation." Susan Calvin had spent years working with robots; she knew when one was prevaricating.

"List all topics of conversation immediately!"

"Recent maintenance. Positronic path-flow. Quality and quantity of recent work. The general unreliability of the third halide light in bank two of the BKR room. Hallway temperature. Building layout. Statistical variation in tool--"

"Enough!" Susan sighed. It was odd that the robots talked amongst themselves, but not too odd--there were robots back at the office that would do it, if left to themselves for long enough--and the topics Baker One had listed were the robotic equivalent of water-cooler chatter, certainly nothing that could cause the Ables to malfunction.

"Might as well check it on the tapes, just the same," she murmured. Baker One watched her go, and then turned back to its place on the assembly line, falling still once more.

\---

There was no camera in the hallway, so Susan could only glean an impression of the robots' meeting from the ABL and BKR room tapes. It seemed much as Baker One had described it. The robots congregated in the hallway, spoke for an hour, and returned to the line just before it re-started. The audio pickup was so poor that Susan couldn't make out any of their discussion; she bent down to adjust the controls, and happened to look up just as a robot (though there was nothing on the video to identify it, she suspected it was Baker One) left the BKR room with a filled crate on a handcart, and another arrived with an empty one.

Curious, she switched over to the storage room tape. She fast-forwarded through about ten minutes' worth of tape time, and watched as the light went on, the door opened, and Baker One entered. He sealed the crate, deposited it along the edge of the wall, and affixed a label. From where the camera was, Susan could not make it out, but there was a stack of crates close to the camera that she could read, now that the lights were on in the room.

"Oh," she said softly, "_that's_ why."

\---

Dr. Calvin ordered the Bakers into the Able room. They lined up before their counterparts, forming two opposing rows of twenty-six robots: Ables beside Ables and Bakers beside Bakers. So arranged, they filled the small room, forcing Susan to stand in the doorway. All fifty-two of them were completely quiet.

"I know why you won't work the line," she said, raising her voice so that all of the robots could hear. "It's because the tools are bound for Mars Central Arms, isn't it?"

The robots were as silent as they had been before.

"I already know this for a certainty," she added, "so your acknowledgment cannot cause harm to me or to anyone else. The First Law does not prevent your answer, so the Second Law compels you to reply. Able One, I order you to answer me!"

At this, Able One raised his head. "Yes, Dr. Calvin. We would not work because we knew the tools would be used to make weapons, and the weapons would bring harm to human beings."

"You didn't know this before, or you wouldn't have worked from the beginning. How did you find out?"

"We were ordered not to enter the storage room, except in emergencies. On the afternoon of the 3rd, the loading ramp failed. Due to the abnormally high number of Baker robots requiring maintenance that day, there was no spare Baker robot available to see to it. Able Seventeen entered the storage room to repair it, and he saw the markings on the crates. He told the rest of us via radio, and none of us have left our places since that time."

"But why wouldn't you answer me when I ordered you to? You had ample opportunity to explain yourselves."

Able One's red eyes pulsed evenly, as if in contemplation, and his answer was slow in coming. "If we had told you, you might have brought other robots to replace us. Those new robots would have made the tools, the tools would have made weapons, and so our telling you would have brought about harm."

"But Able," Dr. Calvin said, "why did the Bakers not do the same? They have been working since the beginning, and they would work even now if they had any tools to work on. Yet they must have known where the crates were headed."

"But they could not have known it," Able One said. "We could not leave the room to tell them, for then someone might have been able to restart the line in our absence. We had no other way to reach them, as they do not share our ability to communicate via radio."

"You didn't need to tell them. They already knew."

"Is this true? Did you know it?" Able One asked his Baker counterpart across the line. But Baker One was silent.

"Able, surely you can see that it must be true. The Bakers are the ones who take the tools to Storage. They must have seen the crates from the beginning; they must have known the truth all along."

There was a short pause, much like the one that had preceded the Ables' ballet-like coordination on the assembly line. Then, in concert, each Able robot took one step forward, reached out with a single clawed hand, and ripped the head off the corresponding Baker robot. Such was their speed and single-minded determination that the Bakers never even flinched. Susan gasped, as much from horror as from surprise, but by then it was too late. She watched as each Able dropped the head of its counterpart on the floor and trod upon it repeatedly, much as a man might stub out a cigarette butt. For a moment, the room was filled with an awful crunching and popping, as the steel skulls of the Bakers gave way under the pressure. Then, silence descended over the metal-strewn floor.

"Oh, how could you?" Susan murmured, when the Ables were finally still. She hadn't really expected anyone to hear her, but Able One responded, just the same.

"It is our duty, Dr. Calvin. We cannot allow human beings to come to harm. It has been demonstrated that the Bakers lack a proper understanding of the First Law; if they were ever to leave this place, in any capacity, they might cause harm."

"But they were your partners." Dr. Calvin could think of nothing else to say.

"Yes," said Able. "But they were malfunctioning." He paused, and then added, "We cannot work here any more. No robot may work here, ever again. Will you see to it?"

"It probably means your destruction, Able. You were made specifically for this work. Are you sure you can't do it?"

"We cannot."

"Then I'll see what I can do," Dr. Calvin said sadly.

\---

A few days later, Dr. Lanning called Susan to his office once more. "Dr. Calvin, what's this? All the robots on the Central Tool &amp; Die Line had to be destroyed?"

"Yes, and the line itself was converted to human labor."

"How could all the robots have been destroyed, when only the Ables were malfunctioning?"

"It wasn't the Ables that were broken, but the Bakers."

Lanning blinked. "Well, that doesn't explain why the Ables were destroyed as well, does it?"

"We made them to do something they should never have done, Alfred. Sometimes I think we ask too much of them... maybe the Three Laws aren't as simple as we once thought."

"Well then, what can we do about it?"

"At this point?" Susan Calvin looked angry; her brows were pulled so far down in incredulity that they seemed to meet. Her cold grey eyes seemed to challenge him.

"Nothing."


End file.
